Outlaw or lonely little boy? You be the judge. (American Stock/Getty Images)

It looks as though it may storm any second here in Atlanta, so I hope your weekend is off to a sunnier start. (But I’ll take this cooler weather over sweltering summer heat any day, even if the price I must pay is cloudy skies.)

The dancing plague podcast request was one of the most intriguing we’ve received. Researching the topic, I was certain I’d heard the story before — in a fictional form. I hadn’t, I realized. I was just conflating it with Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death, ” which is also about disease and frenzied people, but not about the dancing plague. Perhaps the most unbelievable (but true) part of the dancing plague story was the length to which authorities went to keep the people dancing. Or maybe you’re more fascinated by Katie’s discussion of penis thievery?

As we may have conveyed in the Billy the Kid podcast, the abbreviated biography of this outlaw is pretty sad. I’ve been reading Margaret MacMillan’s “The Uses and Abuses of History,” and she says that the contemporary analogue of Billy the Kid might be a gang member. We explained that Billy the Kid chose a life of crime because, as he saw it, there was no other way. His physical stature may have also been a great impediment to him in the Wild West, a lawless land where men looked out for themselves and made a living through hard, heavy labor.

Billy the Kid was kind of like the Marshall Mathers of the American West:  Tough talking and a nasty reputation guaranteed his spot in the pantheon of feared and admired outlaws. Is it because he was so thoroughly mean and immoral that we remember him today? Or is it because we sympathize with him?

More of the American West:
12 Renowned Women of the Wild West
Gold Rushes
How Dude Ranches Work